The newly published book Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change (Routledge, March 2022) features a chapter by Rebekah Modrak. With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, Art as Social Practice, edited by xtine burrough and Judy Walgren, explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices.

Modrak’s chapter, Can This Be a Community When You’re Trying To Sell Me A Luxury Watch?, proposes that if companies are going to claim to create “community,” artists should bring them into the fold of community-engaged practices and trouble their claims.

Art as Social Practice features a foreword by artist Suzanne Lacy. Section introductions by authors/​artists Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present chapters that feature in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, and Sylvain Souklaye.

Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporate new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces.

Rebekah Modrak presented her work to the Wieden+Kennedy New York agency as part of a monthly guest series intended to broaden the per­spec­tive on adver­tis­ing and the respon­si­bil­i­ties of cul­tural pro­duc­ers.

Wieden+Kennedy is a full-ser­vice adver­tis­ing agency that offers brand mar­ket­ing, mar­ket­ing automa­tion, and more. The com­pany was founded in 1982 and has offices in eight cities, includ­ing Ams­ter­dam, Lon­don, New York, Tokyo, Shang­hai, Delhi, and São Paulo.

Modrak’s work as an artist and writer is at the inter­sec­tions of art, activism, crit­i­cal design, and cre­ative resis­tance to con­sumer cul­ture. Her pre­sen­ta­tion to Wieden+Kennedy focused on the ethics of representation in advertising through historical and contemporary examples and through Modrak’s cri­tique of the appro­pri­a­tion of man­ual labor (Best Made Co. / Re Made Co.) and the mar­ket­ing of the White sav­ior myth (Shi­nola / Rethink Shi­nola and Bougie Crap).

Rebekah Modrak co-organized and spoke at Stop Pro­tect­ing Preda­tors: Sur­vivors Speak Up,  a forum addressing U-M’s fail­ures in pre­vent­ing and respond­ing to sex­ual mis­con­duct on cam­pus. The event on Sat­ur­day, Novem­ber 13, from 11 am to 1 pm centered around two panels: The first featured six sur­vivors of sex­ual mis­con­duct at U-M (Isabelle Brourman, Maya Crosman, Katherine McMahan, Jon Vaughn, Tad DeLuca and Chuck Christian), coming together to share experiences and describe the fail­ures of the uni­ver­sity in pro­tect­ing vic­tims, in their own words. In the second panel,  Modrak and other pol­icy-advo­cates described U‑M’s cur­rent sex­ual mis­con­duct poli­cies and what changes should be made to pro­tect the U‑M com­mu­nity, and to cen­ter the voices of sur­vivors.  The Michi­gan Daily cov­ered the event.

A recording of the event is available on YouTube.

Additional information about these cases:

Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan lec­turer Bruce Con­forth was per­mit­ted to con­tinue teach­ing after a stu­dent filed a sex­ual harass­ment report in 2008. Eight years and seven vic­tims later, the Uni­ver­sity encour­aged Con­forth to retire, pre-empt­ing a full review into sev­eral new reports against him. Another sex­ual mis­con­duct case on U‑M’s cam­pus, involv­ing Dr. Robert Ander­son, may be the largest sex­ual vio­lence case in America’s his­tory with a reported 2100+ vic­tims; the Uni­ver­sity knew of the U‑M ath­letic doctor’s sex­ual mis­con­duct since the 1970s, but allowed Ander­son to work and abuse stu­dents until his retire­ment in 2003. There are addi­tional sto­ries of abuse beyond those of Con­forth and Ander­son. For, despite the Uni­ver­sity hail­ing them­selves as rad­i­cally improv­ing sex­ual mis­con­duct poli­cies, the admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ues to fail to pro­vide action­able pro­ce­dures to pro­tect vic­tims, pros­e­cute preda­tors, and pre­vent future mis­con­duct at U‑M.

Rebekah Modrak was selected as the Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities for the 2021-22 academic year. The Institute promotes interdisciplinary research and discourse in the humanities and the arts. The central function of the institute is to form an intellectual community of faculty and graduate student fellows who spend an academic year in residence in the institute, pursuing their research and participating in a cross-disciplinary, weekly seminar.

Throughout the year, Rebekah is working with Italy-based collaborator and curator Marialaura Ghidini to create an extensive net-based artwork challenging the logic of current digital technologies that preference productivity and efficiency over our human nature to be complicated and contradictory. Titled UnProductiveSolutions (UnPro), the artwork presents as a “company” whose mission is to disrupt and challenge assumptions of existing technologies. UnPro will find form as a company website of imagined e-products. Ultimately, UnPro asks: what would technology look like if it supported our right to “complex personhood.” 

Thrilled to share that the Boston Review has published an essay from the book Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts, (Rebekah Modrak and Jamie Vander Broek, editors). The essay “Against Persuasion” by Agnes Callard (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago) explores the value of being inquisitive and the collaborative nature of knowledge through Socrates’ conversations with other people who claimed to have knowledge. Radical Humility was published by Belt Publishing in March 2021. In the book, Callard’s essay appears as “Loving Knowledge Together: Socratic Humility.”

Radical Humility is a collection of essays by philosophers, artists, a lawyer, a journalist, a cook, a columnist, psychologists, educators, consumer culture and race scholars, and others about the value of humility, and the harms of arrogance, from personal, political, and institutional perspectives.

Rebekah Modrak is the recipient of an Arts Integrative Faculty Research Grant from ArtsEngine for her and collaborator Marialaura Ghidini’s project, UnProductive Solutions. Arts Integrative Interdisciplinary Faculty Research Grants support faculty research projects that integrate the arts or design with other disciplines, especially those in engineering and the sciences. UnProductiveSolutions is an extensive net-based artwork challenging the logic of current digital technologies that preference productivity and efficiency at the expense of encouraging humans to be complicated and contradictory. This project considers technology from the perspectives of sociology, critical digital studies, psychology, economics, information and digital studies, and the care industry, among other disciplines.

Rebekah Mod­rak part­nered with Roland L. Leak, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Mar­ket­ing in the Col­lege of Busi­ness and Eco­nom­ics at North Car­olina A&T State Uni­ver­sity to curate a series of essays on ​“The Inter­sec­tion of Power, Race, and Com­merce” for Spark mag­a­zine, a pub­li­ca­tion of the National Cen­ter for Insti­tu­tional Diver­sity (NCID). The series was pub­lished on June 3, 2021.

The series con­tains a col­lec­tion of five invited sub­mis­sions from diver­sity schol­ars whose schol­ar­ship speaks to the rela­tion­ships between com­merce, power, and race in light of shift­ing opin­ions and epipha­nies about racial jus­tice, in the wake of mas­sive racial protests over the past year. Essays sur­vey the impact of white­ness and white man­age­ment on sports cul­ture; ques­tion whether pro­gres­sive rep­re­sen­ta­tions in Nike ads actu­ally trans­lates into racial jus­tice; cri­tique the ways that uni­ver­si­ties’ exhi­bi­tions of diver­sity in their mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als mis­leads prospec­tive stu­dents into think­ing that an aspi­ra­tional iden­tity has already been achieved; exam­ine the his­tory of Wedg­wood dec­o­ra­tive porce­lain being founded on a sin­gu­lar act of loot­ing ​“White Earth” from South Car­olina Chero­kees; and ana­lyze adver­tis­ers’ use of skin as a com­mod­ity, sig­nal of brand mean­ing, and sub­ject of fetishism.

Silke-Maria Weineck, professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, and I devised an intervention renaming Weiser Hall the “Weiser Center for Voter Suppression, Political Assassination, and Witch Burning.”

On Saturday, April 3, 3pm,  we invited faculty, staff and students for a ceremonial renaming service. The building’s new name became visible as free-standing identification signs in PMS 282 blue at the east and west sides of the building, as well as in stenciled lettering, collectively sprayed by students and faculty, on the southern promenade and surrounding grounds of the building.

In an ideal world, we would name our buildings after individuals who represent the public values of our institution and the diversity of our community.  Ronald Weiser’s attempts to suppress the vote, and his recent comments that three female elected officials are “witches” to be “burned at the stake” and that those (shockingly few) Republicans who refused to support the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 should be “assassinated,” disqualify him from this honor. We created this action to urge the university to quickly begin the process of removing Weiser’s name from all university-affiliated buildings and institutions, as no member of our community should be forced into symbolic association with a man who advocates misogyny, violence, and anti-democratic intent.